A reflection for Saturday within the Twentieth Week after the Octave of Pentecost — S. Margaritæ Mariæ Alacoque Virginis, III classis (17 October)
The Mass of St. Margaret Mary opens in the shade of a tree. The Introit is taken from the Canticle of Canticles: Sub umbra illius, quem desideraveram, sedi: et fructus eius dulcis gutturi meo — “I sat down under his shadow, whom I desired: and his fruit was sweet to my palate” (Cant. 2:3). Its verse is the pilgrim’s longing for the house of God: Quam dilecta tabernacula tua, Domine virtutum! concupiscit et deficit anima mea in atria Domini — “How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! my soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord” (Ps. 83:2-3).
Rest and longing: the bride who has sat down at last beneath the shadow of the Beloved, and the soul that still faints for His courts. Both are true of today’s saint, and both will be true of the Gospel, which ends with the promise of rest to souls.
Notice what the Church has done with the readings. The Epistle and the Gospel of this Mass are those of the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus. On the day of the humble Visitandine to whom that devotion was revealed, the Church does not read us a passage about virgins or about Margaret Mary at all. She reads us the Mass of the Heart Itself. The saint disappears into her message, which is exactly what she would have wished.
It is Saturday, ordinarily the day of Our Lady, and the month of her Rosary. In the Office the Books of the Machabees are still being read, the chronicle of a people faithful under persecution. And the saint whose day it is suffered, in her own small cloister, a long and quiet persecution of disbelief, before the Church took up what she had been given to say.
I. Investigabiles divitias Christi: the Epistle
“To me, the least of all the saints, is given this grace, to preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to enlighten all men, that they may see what is the dispensation of the mystery which hath been hidden from eternity in God, who created all things… For this cause I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom all paternity in heaven and earth is named, that he would grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened by his Spirit with might unto the inward man, that Christ may dwell by faith in your hearts; that being rooted and founded in charity, you may be able to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth, and length, and height, and depth: to know also the charity of Christ, which surpasseth all knowledge, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God.” (Eph. 3:8-9, 14-19)
The least of all the saints. Mihi omnium sanctorum minimo. St. Paul does not merely call himself least; in the Greek he coins a word, a comparative built upon a superlative, “less than the least.” St. John Chrysostom, preaching on this verse, lingers over it: the Apostle who laboured more than all the others will not even allow himself the rank of last, and he speaks this way precisely when he is about to describe the greatest commission ever given to a man (Hom. in Eph. 7). The grace and the lowliness arrive together. It is the least who is chosen to announce the greatest riches, so that no one may mistake whose riches they are.
Hold that pattern in mind. It is the whole pattern of the Gospel, and of today’s saint.
Unsearchable riches. Investigabiles divitias Christi. The adjective means “untrackable,” riches whose footprints cannot be followed to their end. St. Jerome, in his commentary on this Epistle, observes that the Apostle does not say the riches are unknown, for he has been sent to preach them; he says that they cannot be exhausted by being known. One may enter them without ever reaching their far wall.
Here the Collect of the day will take up the Apostle’s very word. It speaks of the investigabiles divitias Cordis tui, the unsearchable riches of Thy Heart. What St. Paul called the riches of Christ, the Church on this feast names more intimately: the riches of His Heart. She is not adding to the Apostle. She is pointing to the source from which, in the language of Scripture, every treasure of a man proceeds (cf. Luke 6:45).
I bow my knees. Flecto genua mea. Between the two halves of the Epistle, St. Paul falls to his knees. Doctrine becomes prayer, and the prayer is Trinitarian in its structure: he kneels to the Father, asks that the Corinthians be strengthened by the Spirit, so that Christ may dwell in their hearts. St. Thomas, commenting on this passage, notes that the Apostle prays for the inward man, in interiorem hominem, because it is there, in mind and will, that God’s indwelling is received (Super Eph., cap. 3, lect. 4). Christ does not live in us as a guest in a house He does not own. He lives by faith in the heart, and charity is the soil in which the soul is rooted and the foundation on which it is built: in caritate radicati et fundati.
Breadth, length, height and depth. No verse of this Epistle has drawn more from the Fathers. St. Augustine read the four dimensions as the shape of the Cross, and he returned to the reading more than once (De doctrina christiana II.41; Ep. 140, to Honoratus). The breadth is the crossbeam on which the hands were stretched, and signifies charity spread out in good works. The length is the upright running down to the ground, and signifies perseverance, enduring to the end. The height is the head of the Cross rising above, and signifies hope, lifted toward heaven. The depth is the part of the beam fixed unseen in the earth, and signifies the hidden grace of God from which all the rest takes its strength. To comprehend the dimensions, then, is to understand the Cross; and to understand the Cross is to begin to know a love that surpasses knowledge.
St. Thomas offers a parallel reading in which the dimensions are those of God Himself: the breadth of His love extending to all, the length of His eternity, the height of His majesty, the depth of His wisdom (Super Eph., cap. 3, lect. 5). The two readings are not rivals. The Cross is where the immeasurable God made His love measurable to men.
A charity that surpasses knowledge. Scire etiam supereminentem scientiæ caritatem Christi. The Apostle prays that we may know what cannot be known. The paradox is deliberate. One does not comprehend the love of Christ by standing outside it and measuring; one knows it only by being rooted in it, as a tree knows the soil. And the goal is not information but fulness: ut impleamini in omnem plenitudinem Dei, that you may be filled unto all the fulness of God. This is the language of deification, which the Eastern Fathers never tired of: God became man so that man might share in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4).
II. Discite a me, quia mitis sum, et humilis corde: the Gospel
“At that time Jesus answered and said: I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to little ones. Yea, Father; for so hath it seemed good in thy sight. All things are delivered to me by my Father. And no one knoweth the Son, but the Father: neither doth any one know the Father, but the Son, and he to whom it shall please the Son to reveal him. Come to me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you. Take up my yoke upon you, and learn of me, because I am meek, and humble of heart: and you shall find rest to your souls. For my yoke is sweet and my burden light.” (Matt. 11:25-30)
Hidden from the wise. Abscondisti hæc a sapientibus et prudentibus, et revelasti ea parvulis. St. Jerome is careful here: Our Lord does not condemn wisdom, but those who are wise in their own eyes, who trust their own learning and so cannot receive what must be given (Comm. in Matt. II, on 11:25). St. John Chrysostom adds that Christ does not rejoice that the wise are left in darkness, but that what was hidden from them was revealed to the little ones; He gives thanks for the gift, not for the loss (Hom. in Matt. 38). The door is low. Those who will not stoop cannot enter.
And this is the Epistle again. The Apostle who called himself “less than the least” is among the parvuli to whom the riches are revealed; the Corinthians must be “rooted in charity” before they can comprehend. In both readings knowledge of God is not seized from below. It is received by the humble.
No one knoweth the Father but the Son. St. Hilary of Poitiers draws from this verse the equality of Father and Son: the mutual knowledge that each has of the other is a knowledge proper to God alone, and the Son who knows the Father as the Father knows Him is not less than the Father (Comm. in Matt. 11). The Lord who will in a moment call Himself meek and humble has just declared His divinity. The humility of the Heart of Jesus is not the humility of a creature who knows his place. It is the condescension of God who empties Himself (Phil. 2:7).
Come to me. Venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis. The divine Son, who alone knows the Father, turns at once to the weary. St. Augustine hears in this the whole economy of salvation: He who holds all things from the Father opens His hands to those who hold nothing but their burdens.
Learn of me. Then comes the sentence that St. Augustine loved above almost any other in the Gospels. In a sermon on this passage he imagines Our Lord specifying what He means to teach: not to make the world, not to create things visible and invisible, not to work miracles and raise the dead; but this: that I am meek and humble of heart (Sermo 69). The one lesson Christ explicitly asks us to learn from Him, of all His teaching, is the lesson of His Heart.
It is worth pausing on that. Our Lord does not say “learn of me, for I am powerful,” or “learn of me, for I am wise,” though He is both infinitely. He names His Heart, and He names it by two qualities, meekness and humility. Pius XII would later teach that the Heart of Jesus is rightly honoured as the natural symbol of His threefold love: the divine love He shares with the Father and the Spirit, the infused charity of His human soul, and the sensible love of His human affections (Haurietis aquas, 1956). When He says “learn of my Heart,” He invites us into all three.
A sweet yoke. Iugum enim meum suave est, et onus meum leve. How can a yoke be sweet? St. Augustine answers in another sermon: love makes all hard things easy, and nearly nothing; a man who loves carries without weight what would crush a man who does not (Sermo 70). The yoke of Christ is not lighter because it demands less. It is lighter because it is carried with Him, and in love. The Introit already told us: fructus eius dulcis gutturi meo. His fruit is sweet.
III. A Burgundian girl at Paray-le-Monial
St. Margaret Mary is the saint of this Gospel because she was, by every worldly measure, one of the parvuli.
She was born on the twenty-second of July, 1647, at Lautecourt in the parish of Verosvres in Burgundy, the daughter of a notary. Her father died when she was eight; she fell ill as a child and was bedridden for some four years, recovering, as she believed, through a vow to the Blessed Virgin. The household fell under the control of relatives who treated her mother and her harshly. She was drawn early to prayer, resisted for a time the plans her family made for her marriage, and in 1671 entered the monastery of the Visitation at Paray-le-Monial, the order founded by St. Francis de Sales and St. Jane Frances de Chantal. She was professed the following year.
She was not a gifted nun by the usual measure. She was slow, awkward at her tasks, and inclined to be absorbed in prayer when she ought to have been attending to her work. Her superiors tested her repeatedly, and not always gently.
Then, beginning on the feast of St. John the Evangelist, the twenty-seventh of December, 1673, Our Lord began to show her His Heart. The first revelation came on the feast of the disciple who leaned upon His breast at the Last Supper, and she recounts that she was invited to rest there as John had. In the revelations that followed over the next year and a half, Our Lord asked for the practice of Communion on the first Friday of each month, in reparation, and for the Holy Hour on the night between Thursday and Friday, to keep Him company in His agony in Gethsemane. In June of 1675, during the octave of Corpus Christi, came what is called the great revelation. Our Lord showed her His Heart and, by her account, lamented that the Heart which had so loved men, spending itself to the last to show its love, received in return from most of them only coldness and ingratitude, even in the Sacrament of His love. He asked that the Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi be kept as a feast in honour of His Heart, with Communion in reparation (Autobiography).
What followed is the instructive part. Hardly anyone believed her. Her community thought her deluded; theologians brought in to examine her concluded much the same; she was told her experiences came from a disordered imagination or worse. She obeyed, and kept silent where she was commanded to keep silent. Then, early in 1675, a young Jesuit came to Paray as superior of the little residence there: St. Claude La Colombière. He heard her, examined her, and judged that what she had received was from God. He became her director, adopted the devotion himself, and spread it. He died in 1682; the private journal he left, published after his death, made her mission known beyond the walls of Paray.
The opposition faded slowly. In her last years she was made mistress of novices and assistant superior, and the community that had doubted her began to keep the devotion she had been given. She died on the seventeenth of October, 1690, at the age of forty-three.
The Church moved at the Church’s pace. Pius IX extended the Feast of the Sacred Heart to the universal Church in 1856 and beatified her in 1864; Benedict XV canonized her in 1920. Leo XIII consecrated the whole human race to the Sacred Heart in 1899 (Annum sacrum); Pius XI wrote on the duty of reparation (Miserentissimus Redemptor, 1928) and raised the feast to the highest rank; Pius XII gave the devotion its fullest doctrinal treatment (Haurietis aquas, 1956). A notary’s daughter from Burgundy, whom her own sisters thought confused, changed the prayer of the Latin Church.
The devotion was not new in its substance. St. Bernard, preaching on the Canticle that gives today’s Introit, had already seen the secret of the Heart laid open through the wounds of the Body, so that through the clefts of the rock the tenderness of God’s mercy might be seen (Sermones in Cantica 61). St. Gertrude, St. Mechtilde, and St. John Eudes, among others, had honoured the Heart of Jesus long before Paray. What was given to Margaret Mary was not a new doctrine but a new summons: a public cult, a feast, and above all a call to reparation, addressed to an age that was growing cold.
IV. The Mass as a whole: from the Heart and back to it
St. Thomas teaches that all things go forth from God and return to Him. Today’s Mass traces that movement as a movement from the Heart and back into it.
Everything goes forth from the investigabiles divitiæ, the unsearchable riches hidden from eternity in God who created all things. The mystery hidden from the ages is, in the end, a mystery of love: that God should will to share Himself, and that the Son should take a human Heart in which to love us with a love we could see and touch and wound. The Cross is the shape that love takes in a fallen world, with its breadth and length and height and depth; and the opened side, the Fathers taught, is the door from which the Church herself was born, as Eve from the side of Adam.
The return is made through the same door. The Gospel names the way: Venite ad me… discite a me. Come to Me; learn of Me. The Epistle names the condition: rooted and founded in charity. And the Introit names the end: sub umbra illius quem desideraveram sedi, to sit down at last beneath the shadow of the One we desired, and to find His fruit sweet. The Collect will name it more boldly still: an abiding dwelling in His Heart.
And the path between the going forth and the return is humility. The Apostle is “less than the least”; the riches are revealed to the parvuli; the Heart describes itself as meek and humble. It is no accident that the instrument chosen for this revelation was a slow and doubted nun in a small Burgundian town. God hides these things from the wise and reveals them to little ones, because the Heart He reveals is itself a little one’s Heart, lowly and humble, and it can be recognized only by those who resemble it.
V. The Collect
Domine Iesu Christe, qui investigabiles divitias Cordis tui beatæ Margaritæ Mariæ Virgini mirabiliter revelasti: da nobis eius meritis et imitatione; ut te in omnibus et super omnia diligentes, iugem in eodem Corde tuo mansionem habere mereamur.
“O Lord Jesus Christ, who didst wondrously reveal to blessed Margaret Mary, Virgin, the unsearchable riches of Thy Heart: grant us, by her merits and by imitation of her, that loving Thee in all things and above all things, we may be worthy to have an abiding dwelling in that same Heart of Thine.”
The prayer is addressed not to the Father, as most Collects are, but directly to Our Lord, as befits a feast of His Heart. It borrows the Apostle’s investigabiles divitias and turns it toward the Heart. And it asks for two things that answer the two readings.
The first is a love in omnibus et super omnia, in all things and above all things. It is the Epistle’s charity, with its breadth reaching out into everything and its height rising above everything. To love God above all things is the first commandment; to love Him in all things is to find Him in the ordinary duties, the work badly done and done again, the community that does not understand you. Margaret Mary learned both.
The second is a iugis mansio, a continual dwelling, in His Heart. It is the Gospel’s requies animabus vestris, the rest promised to souls. And it reverses the Epistle in a beautiful way. St. Paul prays that Christ may dwell in our hearts; the Collect asks that we may dwell in His. The indwelling runs both ways, and the second is the fulfilment of the first.
VI. A word for practice
Examine. Where am I wise and prudent in my own eyes, and so unable to receive what God would show me? Where am I still carrying a burden alone that I have been invited to carry under His yoke? And in what part of my life is my love for Him “above all things” but not yet “in all things”?
Do. Keep a Holy Hour this week, as Our Lord asked of St. Margaret Mary: an hour before the Blessed Sacrament, or if that cannot be managed, an hour of prayer at home on Thursday night, keeping Him company in Gethsemane. If you have not yet made the Nine First Fridays, resolve to begin them with the first Friday of November. And make one act of reparation today, quietly, for the coldness with which the Blessed Sacrament is treated, beginning with your own.
Pray. The Collect of the day, slowly, attending to the words iugem mansionem. And the aspiration long attached to this devotion:
Aspiration. Iesu, mitis et humilis Corde, fac cor nostrum secundum Cor tuum. “Jesus, meek and humble of Heart, make our hearts like unto Thine.”
Devote. It is Saturday and the month of the Holy Rosary. Pray the Sorrowful Mysteries, lingering on the first, the Agony in the Garden, where Our Lord asked His disciples to watch one hour with Him; and close with the Act of Consecration to the Sacred Heart, or with the Litany of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
If you wish to go deeper: the Spiritual Practices and Devotions path takes up the Holy Hour, the First Fridays, and the practice of reparation as Our Lord taught them at Paray. The Theology and Doctrine path treats the theology of the Sacred Heart as Pius XII set it out in Haurietis aquas: the threefold love of the Incarnate Word, and why the physical Heart is the proper object of the cult. The Lives of the Saints path continues with St. Claude La Colombière and with the earlier witnesses to the devotion, St. Gertrude and St. John Eudes. The Sacred Liturgy path examines the Mass of the Sacred Heart, whose readings the Church lends to this feast.
Sources. Scripture is cited from the Douay-Rheims with the Vulgate. The Fathers and Doctors are given in paraphrase with their loci: St. John Chrysostom, Homiliae in Epistolam ad Ephesios 7 and Homiliae in Matthaeum 38; St. Jerome, Commentarius in Epistolam ad Ephesios and Commentarius in Matthaeum II; St. Augustine, De doctrina christiana II.41, Epistula 140, and Sermones 69 and 70; St. Hilary of Poitiers, Commentarius in Matthaeum 11; St. Bernard, Sermones super Cantica Canticorum 61; St. Thomas Aquinas, Super Epistolam ad Ephesios, cap. 3. Magisterial texts: Leo XIII, Annum sacrum (1899); Pius XI, Miserentissimus Redemptor (1928); Pius XII, Haurietis aquas (1956). The revelations are given in paraphrase from St. Margaret Mary’s Autobiography.
Sancta Margarita Maria, ora pro nobis.